New light shed over Watergate 30 years on

AFP, DAWN, 15 June 2002

WASHINGTON, June 14: Thirty years after the Watergate break-in scandal
that led to president Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation, the
tools used by the burglars to break into and wiretap the Democratic
party headquarters at the Watergate hotel complex were exposed to the
media on Thursday.

Among those tools are the address book that allowed the burglars to
call the White House, screwdrivers, bugging devices and rubber
surgical gloves.

In a tiny index, written in tight handwriting, Bernard Barker, an
anti-Castro activist arrested in the Watergate building, listed under
HH the telephone numbers of Howard Hunt—an organizer of then
president Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign.

When they called HH’s work number, marked by the initials WH,
the investigators, and later Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward,
were amazed to find they got the White House.

They had stumbled over something that was to become a national
scandal, set off by a third rate burglary in the words of a
White House spokesman.

On June 17, 1972, a night watchman at the Watergate was doing his
rounds at the office complex that housed the headquarters of the
Democratic National Committee when he noticed that a door latch was
stuck open with adhesive tape.

Thinking that workers forgot to remove it, he did. When he noticed the
same thing on his next round, he called the police.

Just over two years later, on Aug 9, 1974, Nixon was forced to resign
after the investigation that followed implicated him in the affair.

As well as arresting the men, police seized a panoply of spying
equipment: miniature bugging devices found in a smoke detector and in
telephones, screwdrivers, tweezers and other tools.

There were also rubber surgical gloves, torches, teargas, a
walkie-talkie system concealed in lip balm tubes, also a putty-colored
raincoat—all carried in a bowling bag. Police also found hairs,
a diving knife found in a hire car, and a listening device allowing
people in a room at a neighbouring hotel to eavesdrop on conversations
taped in the Democratic Party offices.

All of that was handed over to justice officials who used it as
evidence during the Watergate burglary trial, and handed in 1977 to
the National Archives.

The archives, in conjunction with Freedom of Information officials,
marking the 30th anniversary of the Watergate scandal, decided to
bring these pieces to public light as the affair still grabs the
imagination of the US public.-AFP